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Valve's Source SDK now available for free

Half-Life and Steam creator Valve have announced that the company's Source Engine and modding tools will now be made available completely free of charge.

The software development kit (SDK) for the technology was previously only available after the purchase of a Valve game, but following the move to make Team Fortress 2 free-to-play the SDK has now also been made available at no charge.

Valve's Robin Walker has admitted that the free availability of the SDK was not originally planned and was an unintended side benefit of the change in Team Fortress 2's business model.

After a fan pointed out the loophole Walker revealed to website Rock, Paper, Shotgun that Valve decided not to limit the availability, but that the company had not planned in advanced for it.

"We are in the process of getting it all done," he said. "It’s a bit messy because we have multiple versions of the SDK, and there’s some dependencies we need to shake out. But yes, the gist of it is that we’re just going to go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available."

More information is available at the official website, although it still refers to the SDK as being only available with a purchase of a game.

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8 Comments

This, combined with the release of Free2Play games on the Steam platform surely appears like an attempt to pull more developers onto the platform. This might very likely be connected to the Origin release, as well.
Let's see how this works out for Valve.

I dont think Origin would ever compete with Steam, just because Steam is already the biggest and already has the most number of games available. Including the addition of F2P games recently, allows Valve to target more cheap deals at more people. Currently Steam is sitting at over 3 million players daily (sometimes 3.5 million) and no other online gaming service would ever be able to compete with that.

@Jeffrey Kesselman, @Alex Dawson - Valve only released the Alien Swarm restricted modding SDK with Alien Swarm, now, from what I just saw on Steam, it does appear like the actual full Source SDK went free. I sure do assume, though, that Valve will charge a fee for using the license for shipped games.

I think they get quite an advantage in the indiegame sector. If you look at comperable SDKs and distribution plattforms you will surly think first of the UDK. You can publish games on XBL or PSN. In case of XBL you have to pay another fee for a developer account.
If Valve succeeds you get an Engine, a distribution plattform and a developer kit free of charge. I think it will be glorious times for PC based indiegame designers.